Greetings, writers—
In an essay in The Sewanee Review, Jess Walter, author of the excellent Beautiful Ruins (plus six other novels, two collections of short stories, and a nonfiction book) muses on the problem of how to teach writing. What’s an instructor to do, he asks, when “[e]very rule and best practice that has ever escaped [his] mouth seems to unravel under scrutiny or to give way to a dozen exceptions”?
Or what about when every piece of advice seems no better than its total opposite? Sure, maybe you have too much backstory—but maybe you don’t have enough. Maybe your narrator is too unreliable—or maybe she needs to be even more of a liar.
He writes:
Especially with novels, teaching often teeters dangerously close to the tautological: a novel works because it works.
I suspect that’s why, when cornered about what they do, novelists often turn to metaphor, like badgers showing their teeth.
Stendhal: “A novel is a mirror walking along a main road.”
Ralph Ellison: “The American novel is in this sense a conquest of the frontier.”
Annie Dillard: “The novel is a game or joke shared between writer and reader.”
Graham Greene: “The novel is an unknown man and I have to find him.”
I envy lines like this, and wish I had a single metaphor to describe the process of writing my seven novels. None of the above really speaks to me, and so I wonder if novel metaphors aren’t meant to be read suggestively, more like prompts.
Like prompts, people!
Here, quick-quick-quick, are a few:
—Today, write with bared teeth. Metaphorically speaking.
—Today, write like you are trying to find an unknown man.
—Today, write as if you are telling a joke or playing a game.
Walter goes on to talk about how he views himself less as a teacher than as a mechanic, there to tighten the screws or lubricate the chassis (or whatever you do to a chassis) of a student’s prose.
I like this metaphor. After all, the writer has to find her own road and drive her own car down it (remember that old saw, found in a Paris Review interview with E.L. Doctorow, but also all over the internet, including an earlier post on this very Substack: “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way”?). Maybe the best a teacher can do is make sure the engine isn’t knocking and the tires aren’t bald.
But isn’t there a “grand unifying theory” of writing? Walter wants one, and he spends the rest of his essay trying to compare writing a good novel to playing a really excellent round of golf.
[W]hen done right, there is nothing quite like the feel of a well-played hole—the soft draw that lands at a perfect angle to the green, the slight fade into a crosswind that holds an impossible green—except maybe a perfect chapter. To begin a taut, well-voiced book like Charles Portis’s True Grit (“People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day”) is to watch a pro step up to the first tee.
I think that quality of intentionality—choosing a club, or a voice, envisioning a series of shots, the scenes in a novel—is especially important at the beginning—the beginning of a round, a book, a career. The first chapter of your first novel is so wildly important. It must catch the attention of an agent, an editor, readers. They might not give you more than ten or fifteen pages, so it’s not a bad idea to ask if your first chapter is, like the first hole on a course, the best starting place. No voice clearing, no warming up on the range, this is it, where the game starts, where the story has no choice but to proceed.
But in the end, Walter acknowledges the comparison fails: no metaphor can apply to every book, even within one writer’s oeuvre. Plus, “Is there anything more anathematic to creativity than the game of golf ? And the only thing worse than golf are golfers.”